Art has left the Building
Re:Call Interview
Kelly Large
1) When were you at Bournville School of
Art?
1991-1992
2) What course did you study here?
Foundation Studies in Art and Design
3) Who were your tutors?
Nigel Prince, Terry Clarke, Ted and
Bob.
4) What area did you specialize in?
Fine Art
5) What memories do you have of your
first day at Bournville School of Art?
Drawing with Terry
6) What memories do you have of your
final show at Bournville School of Art?
One of the paintings not being finished
but quite liking it like that.
7) What piece did you do for your final
show at Bournville and could you describe it?
Figuarive paintings – a bit Frank
Auebach-y
Don’t have any images – sorry.
8) Could you give just five words to
describe your experience at Bournville School of Art?
My year as a student there helped me
start to define what I wanted from my practice (sorry, that's not five words, I
know!)
9) Could you indicate what creative activity
you have done since your time at Bournville?
Currently I am the Cocheme Artist Fellow
2012/13 at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Curator: Public
Programme at 176, Zabludowicz collection, London, alongside lecturing at
various universities.
10) Could you describe your current
creative practice/ideas/work?
Kelly Large is
an artist based in London and Birmingham.
She has a social practice that is both research and production
based. Her work is often developed out
of a long-term engagement with an organisation or institution involved in
culture making – including archives, libraries, schools, museums and
universities amongst other places. She
uses these situations to explore the conditions that shape cultural production
and the artist’s role within this. Her
current work is pre-occupied with acts of public appearance and the agency
attached to ‘being visible’; especially how different registers of visibility
and public-ness are entangled with the social relations of art practice. The projects she produces unsettle the
encounter between artist, participant, audience and artwork. She employs a multi-disciplinary approach
to making work and uses a diverse range of forms including events, video and
sound broadcasts, performances, texts and objects.
Recent solo
exhibitions and projects: The Becoming, commissioned by
Inheritance Projects for Milton Keynes gallery, involves a group of Open
University BA Art History students, who are geographically dispersed throughout
the UK, collectively metamorphosing into an art object on a given night at the
end of their studies using the technique of lucid dreaming (2012); We, the Object for Art House Foundation,
an on-going sculptural project that aims to connect the gallery with the school
on the same site though transforming a class of thirty pupils into an object
during the their seven years of primary education (2011); 744 x 744 x 744, Limoncello, London, an exhibition exploring the
least used books containing the word ‘artist’ in the British Library collection
(2010); Our Name is Legion for
Beacon, a video work and a spectacle of mass participation within a small,
rural Lincolnshire town (2009); Me,
Myself and I, exploring the function of the artist-in-residence, New Art
Gallery, Walsall. Strategic Questions: What is Comprehension? was a publication
recording readers’ interactions with the British Library catalogue for the 52nd
Venice Biennale (2007). Recent group
exhibitions include: Acoustic Mirrors,
Zabludowicz Collection, London and Among
Other Things, Camberwell Space, London (both 2012), Fig. 3:
I don’t know what to say, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2011); Book Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham
(2010) and Hollywood Wonderland,
Seventeen, London (2009).
11) Could you say a little about the
work you have chosen to include in the Re:Call exhibition?
We, the Object
30 children, Letterpress forme, printed script. Dimensions variable.
2011 - 2017
The children in the 2010-11 reception class from the school next door to
art house foundation, the
commissioning gallery for this work, have agreed to learn a short text, written
for them by the artist, throughout their seven years of primary
education. The text describes the children's materialisation into an
object. The artist will return to the school in 2017, their
graduation year, to witness the cohort recite the text from memory. She has
provided each child with a limited edition script to use as a memory aid during
the process of learning. The script is set in Albertus, an inscriptional typeface originally developed, in the
early 20th century for memorial tablets, and later featured in The Prisoner, a 1960’s cult TV show that
explored the battle between mind control and individualism. The script was
produced using letterpress printing, a form of relief printing in which a
reversed, raised and movable type, is inked and then pressed into a sheet of
paper to obtain a positive right-reading image.
Research shows that the human brain changes when a new cognitive skill,
including vocabulary and speech sounds, are learned and so it is possible that
the physical make-up of each participant’s brain will alter during their
engagement with this work. Each school
child is able to opt in or out of the process if they desire and the artist
will have no control over the children’s process of learning or understanding.
Neither will she have any contact with the children until she returns in seven
years and no way of knowing how the cohort’s developing comprehension of the
task will effect their willingness to participate.
With thanks to: the staff and children of The Cathedral School of St.
Saviour and St. Mary Overy and in particular the 2010/11 Reception cohort for
their involvement in producing We, the Object; Caroline Rolf and ahf for commissioning and supporting the
project; Europa and Charlie Abbott for designing the script, James Edgar,
Printmaking Technician at Camberwell College of Art for use of facilities and
loan of letterpress forme and James Langdon for typography advice.
12) What are you working on at the
moment?
See answers to previous two
questions.
13) What are your creative plans for the
future?
Who knows?!
14) Is there anything else you would
like to add?
Nope.